Phantom Staircase

July 15, 2011

don’t believe in ghost, but…..

when I was a teenager we used to break into an old abandoned factory where train engines were serviced. To get in you had to climb up onto the roof and go in a small service door that had no lock on it, climb down a ladder, and you were on a square spiraling stair case that descended around what I take to be a boiler, but I might be wrong about that. The factory itself was one big room, to accommodate the suspension of train engines so this is likely to be explained by an auditory phenomenon produced by some echo.

However, we climbed in one night and started down the stairs when we heard someone walking on the floor level toward our end of the building. We stopped and waited. We heard them walking all the way down the factory to right below were we were, then started up the stairs, and you could hear that they were going around a staircase that followed the same square spiral pattern as the one we were on. We heard them climb all the way up to our level but they were on the opposite side of the boiler, then nothing.

We waited for what seemed for ever and heard nothing, no walking away, no breathing. I grabbed a bar and walked around the boiler slowly, and no one was there. The reason this still has me perplexed is that there was only one staircase in the building like that, and it was the one we were on.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.